Utopia, you are standing in it!

by Judith Curry

The concern about sea level rise is driven primarily by projections of future sea level rise.

‘Green’ dreams completely gutted.

Seems like only yesterday when you were hard pressed to find anything in print criticising wind and solar, save for sites like this one. Nowadays, there’s a veritable smorgasbord. Quite a few mainstream journalists are waking up to the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time. STT has been joined by dozens of other blogs around the globe, all making concerted efforts to destroy the subsidy-soaked wind and solar scam. Even hard-core green loons like Dr Bob Brown (former head of the Australian Greens) have turned on wind power, with a vengeance.

Michael Shellenberger, whose erudite work has graced these pages many times, had his road-to-Damascus-moment some years ago. Michael, once rated as America’s top green, initially went along with the ‘wind and solar will save us’ meme. But, having applied a little logic and common sense, came to the inevitable conclusion that wind…

If the phrase “may you live in interesting times” actually has its roots in a curse, then, we constitutional lawyers are indeed cursed. The specific nature of the curse is the malleable nature of constitutional controls designed to protect our institutions from the whims of executive action. At the time of writing, Britain is set to leave the European Union without a deal as to future relations on 31 October 2019. Documents from Operation Yellowhammer set out the possible real-world consequences of this. In a meeting of 28 August 2019, the Privy Council issued an Order in Council proroguing Parliament between the dates of Monday 9 September to Monday 14 October 2019. According to a Commons Library Briefing Paper prorogation has not lasted more than fourteen days since the 1980s.

Courts in England and Wales have taken radically different approaches to the lawfulness of the Government’s decision to prorogue…

Historian Robert Conquest is said to have proposed three laws of politics:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.
3. The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

I can’t think of any counter examples to 2 and 3, can you?

Some time ago, Contrapoints made a video on autogynephilia. I’d watched it before without finding it convincing, but I finally decided to write down some notes while watching it, so now I can do a fuller response to it. I’m not going to include everything I observed with my notes, so you might want to read those too if you want a full idea of what I thought of the video.

Contrapoints misrepresents autogynephilia theory

In the beginning of the video at 2:50, Contrapoints contrasts Blanchard’s typology with the idea that trans women transition because of gender dysphoria. However, Blanchard’s typology does not assert that most trans women’s transitions are driven by pure lust, but instead that autogynephilia in some sense contributes to the development of gender dysphoria, which then usually is a main motivator for transition.

This issue comes up quite a lot of times. At 

When Robert Mugabe first gained the leadership of Zimbabwe, (forgive the pun) he was seen as the great white hope on a continent ridden with dictators.

Rob Muldoon was slammed at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference in Sydney for suggesting otherwise, but subsequent events soon proved him right.

Here’s an interesting tale about the Zimbabwean public’s view of Mugabe, as opposed to his much maligned predecessor, Ian Smith.

Like most libertarians, I’m a bit quirky.

Most people, if they watch The Great Escape or Rambo II, cheer when American POWs achieve freedom.

I’m happy as well, but I also can’t stop myself from thinking about how I also applaud when a successful taxpayer flees from a high-tax state to a low-tax state.

It’s like an escape from oppression to freedom, though I confess it might not be the best plot for a blockbuster movie.

In any event, here are two recent feel-good stories about this phenomenon.

Here’s a report about two members of the establishment media who are protecting their family’s finances from greedy Connecticut politicians.

After reports that married MSNBC anchors Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have been mysteriously broadcasting their show from Florida — sources speculated that the location is to benefit Scarborough’s tax situation. The “Morning Joe” anchors have been reportedly on a home set in Jupiter, Fla…

Many people commenting both for and against reducing emissions from burning fossil fuels assume it has been proven that rising GHGs including CO2 cause higher atmospheric temperatures.  That premise has been tested and found wanting, as this post will describe.  First below is a summary of Global Warming Theory as presented in the scientific literature.  Then follows discussion of several unsuccessful attempts to find evidence of the hypothetical effects from GHGs in the relevant datasets.  Concluding is the alternative theory of climate change deriving from solar and oceanic fluctuations.

Scientific Theory of  Global Warming

The theory is well described in an article by Kristian (okulaer) prefacing his analysis of  “AGW warming” fingerprints in the CERES satellite data.  How the CERES EBAF Ed4 data disconfirms “AGW” in 3 different ways  by okulaer November 11, 2018. Excerpts below with my bolds.  Kristian provides more detailed discussion at his blog (title in red…

The brilliant accident of our form of constitutionalism is not just that the executive came to be accountable to an assembly. It is that the assembly came to be responsible for the executive –for its membership, its policy, its operation, everything. Prorogation, in particular, concerns the operation of the proceedings of Parliament, and it is the representatives of the people (and the people themselves in an election) who ought to have, and to exercise, responsibility for holding the Prime Minister to account for misconduct in proroguing. If the judges were to accept the novel claims in Petition of Cherry and other/s [2019] CSIH __ and R (Miller) v Prime Minister No 2 [2019] EWHC 2381 (QB), and forbid the Prime Minister to stymie Parliament with a prorogation, they would disrupt that responsibility.

And the present political crisis is no time to be changing the constitution. It would be better…